Results 3/27/11: Box Office, Groupon, and GOP candidates

1) Which of these movies opening April 1st will perform best at the box office? (Source Code, Hop, Insidious, Super, Rubber)

Once again popular opinion was wrong! This is how you voted:
Source Code     44%
Hop                   30%
Insidious           22%

When I apply the Bayesian Truth Serum algorithm, though, a different prediction emerges:
Hop                  1st place
Source Code    2nd place
Insidious          3rd place

And in real life, Hop indeed was a skip and a jump ahead of Source Code. Here is what really happened:
Hop                  $38 MM
Source Code    $15 MM
Insidious          $13 MM

In other words, BTS was again more accurate than the popular vote in predicting the box office hit this weekend. (I will admit my own surprise that a rabbit pooping jelly beans beat out “a soldier who wakes up in the body of an unknown man and discovers he's part of a mission to find the bomber of a Chicago commuter train”.)

Congrats to the winning players:

Top Scorers:
GP         +2
Maura    +2
Reebs     +1
Claire     +1

2) In December, Groupon turned down a $6B buyout offer from Google. Will Groupon sell for more than $6B in the next three years? (Yes, No)

Sorry Groupon, bad news: the popular vote and the filtered BTS results agree, the answer is “no.” 57% of you said no, and the algorithms supports that as well.

Congrats to the top scorers on this question, in an eight-way tie:
Novci       +2
Dee         +2
Mom       +2
Joel         +2
SSDS +2
Maura +2
Sarah +2
gleshinsky  +2

Of course, we may not know the real life result for some time.

3) Who is the most likely to be the next to formally announce that they are running for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012?

In this case again, BTS and the popular vote agree that Romney is most likely to be the next to formally announce his candidacy. That’s where the agreement ends though, as Huckabee was second place in the popular vote, but ranked 3rd in the BTS ranking (tied with Bachmann).

Candidate.......Popular Vote........ BTS Rank
Romney              43%              1st
Huckabee 18%               3rd
Pawlenty            11%               2nd
Palin 11%               7th
Giuliani               7%                5th
Gingrinch 7%                 5th
Bachmann 4%                 3rd

Top Scorers:
Elena +2
UriBraun +1
Alex +1 

It seems that my respondents are heavily concentrated in Massachusetts, which may have skewed the results. Part of the benefit of using these algorithms is that it should correct somewhat for a non-representative sample, but in this case there may have been an overwhelming number of Bay Staters.